Phaedrus

The dialogue's spine is the argument that true rhetoric is not a knack of persuasion but an art (technē) grounded in dialectical knowledge of the soul and the Forms. Socrates rejects Lysias' written speech and the sophistic conception of rhetoric as the craft of making weak arguments strong, regardless of truth. He argues that a genuine art of speaking must first define its subject, divide it into kinds, and understand the nature of the soul to which it addresses itself . The dialogue equally rejects the idea that love is simply a predatory appetite; the palinode presents eros as a divine madness that recalls the soul to beauty. The result is a philosophy of discourse that demands knowledge, not mere technique.

The palinode is Socrates' recantation of his first speech, which had argued that a lover is a predatory flatterer and that the beloved should prefer a non-lover. Socrates delivers it because his divine sign has warned him that he has sinned against the god of love by speaking impiously . The recantation is one of Plato's most powerful myths: the soul is a charioteer driving two horses, one noble and obedient, one base and unruly. Before incarnation, souls followed the gods in a procession across the heavens and glimpsed the Forms; those who saw them most clearly remember them best. Eros is the mad desire that awakens this memory and grows wings again . The palinode thus transforms love from a danger into a pathway to philosophical recollection.

At the end of the dialogue, Socrates recounts the myth of Theuth and Thamus: the Egyptian god of writing offers his invention to the king, claiming it will improve memory and wisdom, but Thamus replies that writing will produce forgetfulness, since people will rely on external marks rather than internal recollection . Writing, Socrates argues, is like a painting—it seems alive but cannot answer questions, and it circulates indiscriminately to those who understand and those who do not. The critique has been read as Plato's own ambivalence about his medium, a warning about the limits of written philosophy, or a distinction between living dialectic and dead letters. Derrida famously used it to launch his critique of Western logocentrism, arguing that Plato's privileging of speech over writing is the founding gesture of metaphysics .

Both dialogues treat eros as a divine madness and a pathway to the Forms, but they approach it from different angles. The Symposium presents Diotima's ladder of ascent, in which the lover moves from a particular body to Beauty itself through a series of increasingly abstract objects of desire. The Phaedrus presents the chariot myth, in which the soul's recollection of the Forms is triggered by the sight of a beautiful beloved, and the struggle between the noble and base horses dramatizes the internal conflict of the lover. The Phaedrus is more attentive to the particular beloved and to the reciprocal relationship of love, while the Symposium emphasizes the transcendence of the particular. Together they offer the two most influential accounts of Platonic love.

The Phaedrus was first translated into English by Thomas Taylor in 1804, followed by Benjamin Jowett (1892) and H. N. Fowler's Loeb edition (1914) . The most widely used modern translations are R. Hackforth's Cambridge edition (1952), which includes a running commentary, and Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff's Hackett translation (1995), which is standard in classrooms. The main translation challenges concern the technical vocabulary of the palinode—psyche (soul), auriga (charioteer), and the pair of horses—and the dialogue's shifts in register, from the comic opening to the visionary myth to the sober critique of writing. The Nehamas and Woodruff edition includes an introduction that addresses the dialogue's unity, a long-contested question in Platonic scholarship.

A persistent misreading treats the critique of writing as Plato's straightforward condemnation of the written word and a defense of pure orality. This ignores the irony that Plato himself wrote the dialogue. The critique is put in the mouth of Socrates, who never wrote anything, and it is framed within a written text that is itself a masterful piece of rhetoric. The dialogue does not simply reject writing; it distinguishes between writing that is a mere reminder and the 'living word' of dialectic, which is inscribed in the soul of the learner. The Phaedrus is thus a performance of the very tension it describes: a written text that enacts the limitations of writing while demonstrating its power to provoke thought.